Gretchen’s $50 Grocery Shopping Trip and Weekly Menu Plan

This week, I shopped on a different side of town than I normally do. There are a couple of different health food stores right next to each other. Just for fun, and because I had some extra grocery money to spend, I stopped in to both and bought a few things. Here’s what I got:

Natural Grocers

1.64 lbs Organic Broccoli @ $1.99/lb – $3.26 (This much will last us for a couple weeks.)

1 Organic Cucumber – $2.15 (This is CRAZY expensive compared to what I normally pay, but these cucumbers were so big and looked so amazing that I just wanted to try one and see if it tasted a lot better than the ones I normally buy.)

There is talk about them putting in Aldis down in Florida. Course I really miss Publix. They where the only place that had a huge varity of items I could eat dispite my dairy allergy (like several different types of icecream products) Oh how I miss that store.

I feed a family of 4 and shop at the local Farmers Market and Meat market and can feed my family for two weeks for 60 at those two combined and another 40 at Save A Lot. so around 100 for two weeks of groceries for a family of four. It’s a lot more work to put up groceries and prepare meals…..but worth it because we were spending 180-200 a week at Walmart.

It has taken us some time to but organic but we are working on it little by little. We first did it by buying a half a cow. It was expensive upfront but we save every week and the meat tastes completely different the an what you get at the store. We will always get our meat this way. We are starting to buy organic eggs. We have always had to buy special milk cause my son is lactous intolerant so we just build it in our budget. You get used to the costs once you start.

I am not a strict organic shopper because of my budget but I do stick to my fruits and veggies being organic and after several years I can taste the difference in fruits such as grapes and apples and in root vegetables .

It is so funny how many of us took note of the organic items! I would like to know how many people you feed because that broccoli would only make it through 1 meal here (there are 3 of us including a pre-teen boy lol). And WHERE ON EARTH can there be avocados for 29 cents??? The avocados were 95 cents this week & I was so happy I bought 4!

Btw Aldi here has less than fresh looking produce and veggies, same for Save A Lot, theirs looks like everything sat on a dock for days. A pineapple on sale in my area is 2.99, cucumbers and peppers 1.00 each, tomatoes 1.99 lb and Laura’s gr beef is 5.99 or more a lb.